Archive for ‘iPhone – iOS’

Stanczyk should not have been surprised. But WWDC15 surprised me early on, when Apple made a bold diversity statement by introducing us to Jennifer Bailey.

Jennifer is Apple’s VP of Internet Services. While at Apple she has worked on the Apple Store and most recently as the global manager of a global team responsible for developing Apple Pay technology. Jennifer also has the distinction of being the first woman speaker at the WWDC Keynote this year.

Previously Ms Bailey has a background that includes: Apple, SkyTel, & Go Corporation. Ms. Bailey was previously Partner and Co-founder of Spark & Kindling, a strategic marketing services firm, where she specialized in new market opportunity evaluation, market segmentation, and business plan development. Prior to Spark & Kindling, Ms. Bailey served as Senior Vice President of On-Line Services and Operations of myCFO, a financial services firm.

Kudos to Apple for progressing its diversity and promoting women in technology. Along with Jennifer Bailey, Apple also introduced us to Susan Prescott, the VP Product Marketing.

Apple’s 15th WWDC was again surprising. Pity the stories last week were true, no Apple TV announcements. No other hardware announcements either. Still there was plenty of excitement and glitz and all across laptops, smartphone and even TV the bandwidth was electric with Apple announcements.

The conference started with the Mac’s OS X operating system (El Capitan). Good Stuff and many of the changes foreshadowed what people were expecting in the mobile ecosphere for Apple.

After OS X, the klieg lights shined upon iOS 9. There will be greater emphasis on privacy and security. The 2-factor authentication will provide greater security for your Apple-ID. The privacy part is a re-iteration of Tim Cook’s pol;icy that Apple will not monetize from your personal data. It will collect, generically your personal data and keep it local on the phone, in order to provide, “Proactive Assistance”. There will be many ways that Apple provide’s this machine learning trick to aid you. For example, if you start an email, when add a person to the list of people, the pro-active assistance will suggest other people you frequently CC in your emails. A few examples of this assistance was shown. I will hold my breath and comments for when I see it work with me. I am sure it will work, do not get me wrong this is Apple. My concerns lie in will this eat bandwidth, space or be a nuisance.

Enough on machine learning. The Built-in Apps gets some love. They will be built on Metal (the API for Graphics) and the UI should be a good bit faster and maybe some overall speed improvement as well since more work should be off-loaded of the CPU to the GPU. This will of course be of interest to all who play games. Notes gets some extra features ( is it too late; I guess I still use Notes so perhaps there are others out there too). Maps is better as well. Public transit help, nearby features improved are a couple of the new updates. There is a new Apple App … NEWS. You should think Flipboard. It will be pretty and sleek. It did remind me of Flipboard (without magazine curation).

Here some iPhone news that I was keen on: ❶ It will use less battery, resulting in approximately 1 more hour of life per full charge, the iOS operating software ❷ will take less physical space (more room for apps, photos, music, etc.), ❸ Pic-In-Pic ability so you can minimize a video/while watching and put it in a corner of the screen while you type an email (or are tweeting?). This leads to the fact that the iOS 9 will be more multi-tasking. In fact, for you iPad users (Mac users too) you now have a ❹ split screen capability(SplitView) to have two apps running at the same time and interactive. You can also copy/paste data between the two parts of the screen (by dragging?). ❺ Keyboards will now have shortcut bar (which even third-party keyboards can utilize). How about bolding or underlying your text from your keyboard?

This is a Developer Conference and there was much for this geek-boy to love. Swift2 (new and improved). The Swift language will be Open Source too! In fact you will be able to program in Swift for iOS, Mac, and LINUX by the end of the year. So many new APIs: Metal, with gaming Kits, 26 APIs on the “Dev” screen, plus Pic-In-Pic, SplitView, Slide-Over, etc. 100 Billion apps download and $30 Billion paid to developers thru the App Store!

More Apple Pay (its on Discover card now) and in the UK too. Apple Watch and Apple Watch OS got some new features. HomeKit, HealthKit, CarPlay were all represented. You know what else I was impressed with? I believe for the first time ever, Apple had two women VP’s on stage for the WWDC! Bravo to Apple for making their emphasis on diversity more visible. But you know what? Both of these ladies have been with Apple for a decade: Jennifer Bailey VP of Internet Services and Susan Prescott VP of Product Marketing. Kudos to both of these women and to Apple.

Apple spent a lot of its, “One More Thing” time on Apple Music to close the keynote. Streaming music, $9.99 for you or $14.99 for up to five people in your family with each getting their own streaming. The Keynote ended on Apple Music and “The Weeknd” playing a new song for the crowd. OK Internet you can breathe again. Already this conference has had an effect on markets – not Apple stock, Pandora (down 3.81%).

I know people are going to say WWDC was underwhelming because there was no hardware and because Apple TV was a no-show. But it seems that there was an awful lot to think about across a broad spectrum of products, so I found it interesting.

Today is the start of RootsTech 2013. So in honor of the conference I will blog today about Genealogy, and Technology.

Last year Google announced it was getting rid of iGoogle and now this week it said it was getting rid of its RSS Reader (hence probably why they announced iGoogle was going away). So I have decided how I will replace these two tools in my portable genealogy toolbox. My Solution … the FlipBoard app.

FlipBoard

The screenshot above (at the top) shows a portion of my iGoogle (still available until July). As you can surmise, I used it as a newspaper dashboard for keeping me abreast of the genealogy news in my focus areas. You may have noticed it is quite TEXTUAL. As such, it lacks appeal and ease of scanability. This is where Flipboard app comes in. Now Stanczyk was not using Google’s Reader … that is directly. I think iGoogle probably was a tool that used its own Reader (RSS feeds). It gave me the ability to have a genealogy dashboard (or portal as we used to say). Flipboard will however import your Google Reader. There are other alternatives like Pulse or even WordPress that can import your RSS subscriptions for you. But this jester likes FlipBoard.

As you see, Flipboard is visually appealing and easily, quickly scanable. What you may not realize that these Flipboard “blocks” are the same feeds I had in the iGoogle tool. However, now my Eastman Online Genealogy and my GenealogyBlog are visual. Notice I was able to also get my Ancestry Member Connect Activity feed too! So I have everything I had before in a kind of retro “Life Magazine” visually appealing way updated for the Internet age ! I actually think of Flipboard as my Internet Magazine that is finely attuned to MY interests. But as you see, you can use it as your genealogy dashboard of what is going on currently in genealogy (or any topic you are interested in).

You may not have noticed in the Flipboard image, I have my own blog in the lower left corner. When you click on that “block” it takes to my “section”. Where my own blog posts are very attractively displayed in the Flipboard magazine style. Very nice!

Flipboard runs on your smartphone or your tablet. I really like how it looks on the tablet (iPad in my case). Seeing my blog in Flipboard changed my style of writing a blog. I wanted my blog posts to look good and be visually appealing in Flipboard. So now I take some extra measures to make sure it will look good, but I have to admit that Flipboard does most of the work and it does make your blog look good.

Flipboard can take your Twitter feed, or Facebook or Blog or even a custom RSS Feed like my Ancestry Member Connect Activity. It even takes Flickr or LinkedIn or just about anything you may use in your social networking / media creation world.

So I am no longer sad that iGoogle or the underlying Google Reader are going away. I have evolved and I am using Flipboard and I am much happier. I can keep tabs and I can keep informed and I am frequently entertained too. What a great app!

RootsTech.org is a genealogy conference that combines two of my passions: Genealogy (Roots) and Technology (Tech). Stanczyk went to last year’s conference and was impressed!

It is a Family Search International conference and is based in Salt Lake City at the Salt Palace Convention Center, not far from the Family History Library. It is a 3-day conference with a wide variety of topics covered. The dates for 2013 are: 21-March-2013 – 23-March-2013 (THU, FRI, SAT).

This jester thinks that last year was a better year, judging by the sessions that are planned for 2013 as compared to what sessions were done in 2012. However, the 2013 exhibitors seems to shaping up to be much better (they say 40% more).

The smartphone Apps were released: 25-Feb-2013. So for those mobile genealogists, gear up by clicking on the following links:

Ancestry has a version of their app out that supports the new iOS6/iPhone product release. Stanczyk, uses iOS6, so I took the plunge and upgraded.

The changes are really subtle. I am not certain whether I have seen them or not. The tree displays fast and it appears animated. Other displays changed subtly not much here, but all good. UPGRADE (click on image).

The image by the way lists the new features for version 4.0.2 (as well as previous release 4.0). Image as text.

Notice the snazzy new iTunes/App Store interface (a part of iOS6).

Stanczyk has been busy writing a new two-article blog post on my third success with the Social Network Analysis (aka Cluster Genealogy) technique. I hope to complete that soon. As it so often happens, an initial foray kept expanding as a result of the connections.

Watch this space !

P.S. October is Polish American Heritage Month. Here is what the Polish American Center (Philadelphia) is doing … Don’t forget on Columbus Day to celebrate our native son . The book came out in Polish in May 2012 and has now been translated into English — They are looking for a book publisher !!!

Mostly I like it. The user interface is a radical departure, but mostly I like it. Your family trees will be updated and that takes some time. So I am guessing how the data is stored on their Servers changed too.

The tree view now allows for more ancestors to be viewed and you can switch back/ forth between only direct lineage ancestors and seeing siblings/cousins. It felt speedier too.

Do I have your attention genealogists? One seventh of the world’s population is on Facebook – perhaps your 2nd and 3rd cousins are there waiting for you to engage them in some family history. Skype has nearly 107 Million “Real Users” and recently hit 41.5 Million concurrent users !

So being social can help you reach more people who may have a piece to your family history. I have searched Facebook with modest success for the ‘ELIASZ’ or ‘ELIJASZ’ family name. Not everyone will friend you anymore. I have had success in SKYPE finding an ‘ELIJASZ’ family member in my grandfather’s ancestral village of Pacanow in Poland. I once had a very lucky success with a social network in Poland, named nasza-klasa.pl (now more easily found at http://nk.pl/ ). Now this jester is minimally conversant in Polish and my “cousin” in Poland was zero conversant in English. But, I was able to use Google’s Translator (English to Polish and vice versa) with success although it did generate some laughter at times. The final result was a letter from Poland with a copy of my grandparents’ marriage record from the actual church book in Biechow, Poland! Nasza-Klasa also yielded two 2nd cousins who were born in Poland (one since moved to the US) and we keep in touch via Facebook.

How else can you use social media to aid your genealogy? Write a genealogy blog (like this blog for example). I went to a recent Polish/Slavic genealogy seminar this year and spoke to a fellow blogger, Donna Pointkouski, who writes the genealogy blog, “What’s Past Is Prologue”. Donna called genealogy blogs, “2nd Cousin Bait” . She said by writing about your genealogy searches, successes and family members, your blog can lure these more distant family tree members to you. It works because search engines like Google or Bing find your blog posts and index key words (tags/categories) and proper nouns in their databases and out they pop when 2nd/3rd cousins are trying to Google their family trees. Stanczyk has personally located two 2nd cousins and one 3rd cousin via the blog. One 2nd cousin even gave me a picture of a previously unknown grand-aunt from before 1910 — jackpot! I was then able to locate that grand-aunt in microfilm from the LDS Family History Library for her children’s birth records in Poland.

A couple more blog tips – Sprinkle your blog posts with the lingua franca of your ethnic lineage to lure readers from your ancestral home. Finally on your blog software (WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc.) – get the widget(s) to share your blog posts on your other social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Make sure you get the widest exposure possible to lure your family from all over. Ask family and friends to add your blog/tweets to their Flipboard and possibly ‘star’ the better posts for you to up your Klout.

Lastly, you may want to put your family tree online. Some of my greatest finds have come from collaborating with other genealogists on Ancestry.com. It is the largest collection of genealogists and paid genealogy subscribers — serious genealogists. These people found me and my family who as it turned out were a part of their family tree too. I cannot count the number of family members I have met from Ancestry.com. Let me tell you that my greatest finds were from a woman whose family I and my father thought were only friends from the “old country” whose families renewed their friendship here in the US. From this woman (Kim), who I helped out by reading her grandparents’ marriage record from a Polish church in Detroit. What do the two of us discover, but her great-grandmother was an ELIJASZ from Pacanow. As it turned out, her great-grandmother was my great-grandfather’s sister and that the two of us shared a great-great-grandfather — we were 3rd cousins! So we were blood relatives not just family friends as our parents had thought. I found out my father was her father’s best man — neither of us knew that beforehand. Her grandmother (Rose Wlecialowski) was a best friend of my grandmother. I thought I had never met this third cousin … wrong! She had photos of me in her family pictures. We were so young neither had memories of the other. She had pictures of me as a 3 year old child that I did not have, with my young father on her grandmother’s farm. She had a picture of my young grandmother from the 1930’s with her grandmother! This was a B-O-N-A-N-Z-A!

I found her great-grandparents’ marriage record from Pacanow and had it copied from the church book. I translated it from Russian for her (and for my records too). It confirmed that we were indeed 3rd cousins and shared great-great-grandparents (Martin Elijasz & Anna Zasucha). I also eventually found the birth record from the first child that my paternal grandparents had together over in Poland and little Wladyslaw Jozef Elijasz had Rose Wlecialowski for his god-mother. Her grandmother was a god-mother to one of my “uncles”. Poor little Wladyslaw died in infancy and never made the trip to America with my grandparents and my aunt Alice. My father and the rest of my aunts and uncles were born here in the US.

So you see, your family is out there. You just don’t know it yet. Use the social networks, USA and overseas versions. Write a blog to lure your cousins. By all means join Ancestry.com too and upload your family tree to Ancestry.com. These will grow your family tree more completely than you could if you eschewed not to use the Internet. Make your family tree mobile — load it to your iPhone and start collaborating in the Cloud. You will thank me later!

Stanczyk has been noticing some new software lately. This week Google had their Google I/O Conference and they released some new software there of note. For those with Apple’s iOS devices, we finally have the Google Chrome browser available to use on our iPhone/iPad. This jester quick downloaded the app as I had been waiting for it.

At RootsTech 2012, Google announced that they were going to create a microcode widget (still not here yet). But about that time, I noticed they had a new widget (see yellow highlight at the left) next to their Bookmark-This-Page star widget in the Chrome browser, when you go to the Ancestry.com and visit your family tree. This widget was/is not available in Apple’s Safari browser. This little widget will do a look-up at FamilySearch.org on the person in your tree you are presently at. Sometimes I use this to see if there is any new database available that has something on my ancestor.

Sadly, the Chrome browser app on iPhone did not have the widget. The browser did work fast. Depending on how your brain works, you may prefer Chrome over Safari (or vice-versa). I found both functionally about the same. Here are Chrome and Safari side-by-side (iPhone screen shots) …

Also new on the iOS device scene is a new app, named Heredis. It is an attractive app, but I was not willing to hand enter all my family tree again (and I have been mocked that my 1070+ person tree is SMALL). I could not find a way to import my GEDCOM from any device. I tried hooking the iPhone up to a laptop and I also tried having them on the same WiFi network — no luck. The HELP functionality was absolutely no help. My recommendation is you do not bother unless you are just starting out and do not mind entering your data by hand on your iOS device.

Heredis (in red circle)

As you can see from the screen shot I am trying to go mobile with my genealogy. There is MyHeritage, Ancestry, Mocavo, Indexing, and Heredis. There is also a RootsTech app — which EVERY technical conference should embrace for their attendees.

The Indexing App is so that you too can pitch in and help FamilySearch.org index images so we all get more databases to browse/search online.

We have already have had a few episodes of “Who Do You Thin You Are?” on NBC — a couple of really good ones too. This Sunday (March 25, 2012) on PBS will air the start of their 10 part series, “Finding Your Roots, With Henry Louis Gates, Jr.“. So we can watch Helen Hunt on Friday and then on Sunday night we can learn about the roots of Cory Booker & John Lewis.

This series has already made a startling announcement related to comedian Wanda Sykes. In the NYT, article “Family Tree’s Starting Roots” we are told that,“The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched, ” said Mr. Gates. The Wanda Sykes episode will air in May — mark that one down now!

I read the New York times article (see prior link, twice) and was startled by Wanda Syke’s family tree — a new twist again on African American genealogy (there is a fascinating reason why her roots are so well documented).

Scan Pages App

I was so motivated that I used the NYT newspaper article to demonstrate a new App on the iPhone (yes its free), called Scan Pages. I had previously download another Ricoh App, ImageToText (which OCRs an iPhone image and emails you the OCR’ed text) –which I had occaision to use during the RootsTech 2012 conference. The Scan Pages App is not an OCR application. It does create images (B/W are much better than color) that can be mailed in JPG of PDF format. It cleans up the images (in terms of straightening or de-skewing) and emails them to you. I did the newspaper’s article of Wanda Sykes in PDF. I also did a Scan Pages black-white image of a 1905 directory of Catholic Churches in Detroit . If you compare the two PDF documents, it is clear the cleaned-up B-W (1905 Churches) beats the color (Wanda Sykes).

Later on this week, I am going to try using the App, PDF Splicer, to put together in one PDF document the two emails of the two page article on Wanda Sykes. I also have two pages of that 1905 Church Directory so I will also try combining those two PDFs as well in PDF Splicer.

Mobility Genealogy is a fast-paced niche. Keep tuned in here for ideas to use in your research.

I guess this is what happens when you come back from a conference. Your juices are flowing and you cannot wait to get to work on using the new knowledge you acquired to further your aims.

You can see the impact that Steve Morse had and Dallan Quass, Ryan Heaton, FamilySearch Cross Platform, Amy Johnson Crow, my Family History Library research results, Brooke Ganz and Google had upon me.

I have to admit Jay Verkler had a HUGE impact upon me, but I do not see what I can do about his vision???

Did you go to RootsTech 2012? If so, please comment/email on what you are doing.